Focusing on the reflection and analysis of the contemporary urban project, Actar produces award winning books which have impacted the social context of architectural research and practice for the past twenty years. Now entering an exciting new phase focused on the multi-platform development of specialized content through urbanNext, Actar is producing new tools for its global dissemination with new impulses, new proposals, and new goals to expand architecture to rethink cities.

Actar D also co-publishes and distributes worldwide books from eVolo and from renowned schools of architecture including Harvard Graduate School of Design; Yale School of Architecture; Columbia Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation; MIT School of Architecture + Planning; University of Virginia School of Architecture; Cornell University; and Rice University.

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Category: epub

Alternatives to urban sprawl

Total Housing was designed to be a demonstration of the virtues of high and medium density multi-family homes, and an antidote to urban sprawl. The selection of works in Total Housing (in hard copy and on its supplementary website: www.actar.com/totalhousing/) spans a period coinciding with the height of the housing boom, and consequent bust, experienced in most “developed” economies. From among the huge amount of projects developed in this period, Total Housing selects 61 of them from 22 countries which exemplify outstanding innovations in construction systems, layout of residential space, systems of unit aggregation, integration of the residential program into the other functions that make up our cities, and repercussions in the formation of the urban fabric. These innovations are summarised in a series of concepts or keywords that identify their “virtues” as a residential model on the first page of each project. This book is a design manual as much as a reference for future good practices. Its structure follows a simple sequential order of the number of homes included in each project (from 4 to 750), regardless of the other complementary programs they may respond to. This sequence aims to facilitate the identification of possible examples and case studies, and show that interesting design solutions are found in big and small projects alike. The final section consists of detailed plans of 17 of the works in the book.

In the Age of Environment, the scale waste management is geographic all while often relegating such undesired matter to invisibility as matter out of place. Geographies of Trash reclaims the role of forms, technologies, economies and logistics of the waste system in the production of new aesthetics and politics of urbanism. Honored with a 2014 ACSA Faculty Design Award, the book charts the geographies of trash in Michigan across scales to propose five speculative projects that bring to visibility disciplinary controversies on the relations of technology, space and politics.

The book reclaims the materiality and spatiality of municipal solid waste systems. The research-design methodology and book structure adopt a threefold approach, 1) to conceptualize the spatial issues; 2) to chart relations of trash and space in Michigan across different scales; 3) to speculate on alternative strategies, rituals and imaginaries that reclaim trash as matter in place. Geographies of Trash proposes five situated generic architectural strategies of trash-formations throughout the American territorial grid. By making trash visible and formal, the project aspires to engage disciplinary debates on waste systems in architectural urbanism.

An attempt to debunk various misconceptions, half truths and, in some cases, outright lies which permeate the industry of design.

Written both passionately and irreverently, Ward pulls from his ten years of experience to tackle lighter subjects such as design fetishists, Helvetica’s neutrality and urgent briefs, alongside the validity of design education, the supposed death of print, client relationships and pitch planning. In addition, the book includes contributions from more than a dozen renowned professionals such as Milton Glaser, Stefan Sagmeister, Christoph Niemann y David Carson.

Radical Domestic Architectures between 1937 and 1959

Francisco González de Canales

Five experiments made by prestigious architects on their own homes during the dark days of the Second World War.

In most books or manuals on the history of modern architecture we found a large number of pages devoted to the avant-garde movement that took place in-between wars and to the reconstruction and expansion after World War II. Therebetween, as a misunderstanding or an agreed silence, is a big gap of dark years, wars and exiles of which you can hardly speak about. It is precisely in those dark years when the most experimental and inspiring projects had place. Architects and artists relegated to the margins of civil reality began to present a picture of reactions to a cultural situation unsustainable. Francisco González de Canales analyzes a constellation of scattered cases between late thirties and late fifties of the twentieth century he calls domestic self-experimentation.

Architectural Chronicles of Generation-X

Alejandro Zaera-Polo

An insight into the theoretical discourse that shapes and expands the architect’s practice.

This compilation of texts written since 1986 reveals a parallel activity to Alejandro Zaera-Polo’s professional life. The book is like a sniper’s log, a register of events for the purpose of accumulating experience for future missions, be it academic or professional, trying to identify tendencies and to assess performances, rather than to establish truth.

Essays on Thermodynamics, Architecture and Beauty

Iñaki Ábalos, Renata Sentkiewicz

A compendium of essays and projects, that creates a projective document able to set up new scenarios for the architecture of the next decade.

This is a book that unfolds arguments and designs around the concept of “thermodynamic beauty”. This new aesthetic category opens up new and unexpected directions to the architect’s work, connecting architecture and thermodynamics without giving up the tectonic tradition. The compendium is developed through the concepts of Somatisms, Verticalism, Thermodynamic Materialism, Monsters Assemblage, and, summarizing design strategies and opening new territories at the scales of building, public space and landscape.

Fluid Architecture and Liquid Engineering

Matyas Gutai

The book introduces water as a building material to build unique, responsive-able structures and define a new paradigm for architecture and sustainable design.

It is comprised of three main parts: the first part explains the theoretical framework of trans-structures and is also accompanied by photos and diagrams of the laboratory tests; the second part shows realized related projects accompanied by interviews with key designers of the buildings; the final part introduces a built Trans-structure: Water House experimental pavilion, which utilizes water as building material. Water gives unique aesthetics and structural characteristics to the building with real response ability based on the properties of water, thus allowing liquid engineering to provide a new solution for contemporary sustainable design.

In this brilliant essay, Gillermo Zuaznabar sets out to describe Donald Judd as if he were an unknown figure, a great pioneer.

Taking “Specific,” the seminal text written by Judd in the mid-sixties, as the central theme, the author analyzes the artist’s main concepts and his whole career from a new perspective: “… what one seeks is an object that speaks of the world in which it is moving or of the world from which it is moving away. One searches for a boundary work, a frontier, that says, simultaneously, where it is coming from and where it is going, a work in which interests overlap. A work that will function as a mark or a crossroads, locating this work is the first exercise…”.

Internet has changed our lives but it hasn’t changed our cities, yet

Vicente Guallart

The Barcelona Architect in Chief peals the axes in which the cities must be sustained to adapt them to the new information age, and to generate its own resources.

Internet has changed our lives but it has not yet changed our cities. Any technological revolution takes paired radical transformations in the life styles. If the age of the car and the oil shaped the cities of the 20th century, the society of the information will form those of the 21st century. It is an unstoppable evolution that, nevertheless, it is necessary to be able to lead with criterion. It is a question of taking advantage of the urban experiences accumulated for centuries by the human beings and having present that the growth cannot be unlimited and the energetic resources that our planet offers have expiry date. Vicente Guallart exposes this fascinating process in a book loaded with ideas, information and proposals.

The past two decades have witnessed a resurgence of ecological ideas and ecological thinking in discussions of urbanism, society, culture, and design. The field of ecology has moved from classical determinism and a reductionist Newtonian concern with stability, certainty, and order in favor of more contemporary understandings of dynamic systemic change and the related phenomena of adaptability, resilience, and flexibility. But ecology is not simply a project of the natural sciences. Researchers, theorists, social commentators, and designers have all used ecology as a broader idea or metaphor for a set of conditions and relationships with political, economic, and social implications. Projective Ecologies takes stock of the diversity of contemporary ecological research and theory—embracing Felix Guattari’s broader definition of ecology as at once environmental, social, and existential—and speculates on potential paths forward for design practices. Where are ecological thinking and theory now? What do current trajectories of research suggest for future practice? How can advances in ecological research and modeling, in social theory, and in digital visualization inform, with greater rigor, more robust design thinking and practice?